For now, the college sports landscape — and conference realignment — rests. So many dominoes have fallen in recent years that teams from as far west as Omaha, Neb., play in the Big East Conference. The Idaho football team will join the Sun Belt Conference this summer and play games in Louisiana and Georgia this fall.

Louisville, which has switched from Conference USA to the Big East to the American Athletic Conference in the past decade, officially joins the ACC on Tuesday, just before another wave of major changes hits college sports occurs with NCAA governance reform and fallout from O'Bannon v. NCAA. Meanwhile, the ACC this week sees charter member Maryland depart for the Big Ten, where its arrival will be accompanied by former AAC member Rutgers.

The remainder of the membership shifts in the Football Bowl Subdivision come outside the Power Five conferences, with East Carolina, Tulsa and Tulane joining the American, Western Kentucky and Old Dominion entering Conference USA and Appalachian State, Georgia Southern, Idaho and New Mexico State joining the Sun Belt.

The ACC, with its lucrative broadcasting agreement with ESPN and its grant of rights that locks its 15 members into the league until at least 2027, adds conference credibility for Louisville. The school sorely lacked such status playing football in the Big East and C-USA and spending the past year in the AAC. The ACC is the fourth league Louisville will call home since leaving the Metro Conference in 1995.

"This is the biggest news to happen to the university," said Mark Jurich, son of Louisville Director of Athletics Tom Jurich and Louisville's senior associate athletic director for development. "To think about the company that we're moving into: That's exclusive company. It allows all of our sports to compete at a national level."

Brent Seebohm, Louisville's associate athletic director for external relations, and his staff studied other universities and how they handled conference realignment. They looked at Missouri's and Texas A&M's strategies for joining the Southeastern Conference and Pittsburgh's and Syracuse's campaigns when they moved into the ACC last year.

The process started eight months ago, beginning with brainstorming and evolving into the frenetic and final preparations to market Louisville as the transition begins.

"It really is a major rallying opportunity for the university at large," Seebohm said. "It elevates the pride we have for our sports and academic programs."

Jeff Greer writes for the Louisville Courier-Journal, a Gannett company.